When creating video content, visuals often get the lion’s share of attention. But music and sound effects can be an equally powerful, often under‑appreciated creative tool. Scientific studies suggest that audio doesn’t just add polish to your productions, it shapes how viewers feel, remember, and respond to your content.

In this article, we explore 5 powerful ways sound can impact your audience. See if any of these insights resonate with your style of content.

1: Music enhances memory and recall

There is empirical evidence that music can improve memory recall. In one study, participants who listened to “activating” music after learning a list of words recalled more words, especially negative ones, than participants in silence or white noise conditions. This could be particularly effective if you produce educational or informative content.
Another experiment showed that when people learned text set to a melody or rhythm, rather than plain spoken words, recall was significantly better: rhythm (with or without accompanying music) provided a structural frame that helped memory.

2: Music and effects guides visual attention

It has been shown that as well as influencing mood sound can steer what people look at. In one particular eye‑tracking experiment, participants watching film clips with background music had faster initial fixations on key objects compared to those watching without music. The music also added emotional weight to the story.

As a content creator, using well-timed sound effects or musical cues could help guide the viewer’s gaze, emphasizing important visuals more effectively than visuals alone. This could be particularily useful when promoting a product, a call-to-action, or emphasising a dramatic moment.

3: Music can instantly shape emotional reaction

Music is one of the most powerful forces for tapping into the brain’s emotional processing systems. A neuroimaging (fMRI) study showed that listening to emotionally charged music, while imagining a scene, activated deep‑brain regions such as the amygdala, hypothalamus, and parts of the reward and emotional circuitry.
Another recent fMRI study found that during movie‑watching, musical characteristics like tempo and tone correlated with shared emotional responses across viewers with brain‑activation in audiovisual and narrative‑processing areas.

Using the right soundtrack in your videos can help to “prime” your viewers emotionally. This often happens before they consciously interpret what’s on screen.

4: Music allows for a universal shared emotional experience

Because music is processed at a more fundamental neural level (in emotion and reward circuits), it can elicit emotional responses broadly. This processing can sometimes even bypass language or cultural barriers, particularly when using instrumental music. As one fMRI study of movie‑watching along with soundtrack showed, musical features correlated with shared emotional perception across multiple viewers.
That suggests music can help your video resonate beyond local contexts reaching a global audience more effectively than words alone.

5: The right sound/visual combination can create a rich, immersive experience

Research on film and soundtrack cognition reveals that when music and film are emotionally congruent (i.e., music mood matches the visuals), they tend to be encoded together. This creates a unified memory trace. On the other hand, if music and visuals conflict emotionally, the memory traces remain separate or is much weaker.
Similarly, emotionally touching music, for example, during a face‑encoding task, improved recall of faces under certain conditions. This suggests that music can deepen emotional perception and the encoding of visual information. This emotional response could work effectively in your content, for example when creating opening titles.

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